- Perhaps they should lock the firmware down to doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING other than playing PS3 games and sell the console for $10. Will that make us buy one and buy 1000 games?

Also remember that the PS3 was one of the first devices to offer Blu-ray playback... and was the *cheapest* way to get a bluray player for a while.

This was a combo move by Sony - they offered a major incentive to purchase a PS3, while at the same time making Bluray affordable when it wasn't otherwise (HD-DVD players were much cheaper).

Since Sony had a major investment in Bluray, it was to their advantage to bring this technology to consumers as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Without making the PS3 more enticing to consumers as a "media center" and "general computer", along with "backward compatible" (plays PS2 games), they really would have had a hard time getting it off the ground to compete with the cheaper consoles on the market.

Since then, they've removed backwards compatibility, and the OtherOS features from newer machines - sounds like they're doing exactly what you're suggesting they should do.